Hi everyone- The idea of posting a build thread didn't occur to me until mid-way through my build, unfortunately, so I'm going to do a retro-documentation of my project here now, and I'll be adding to it as I have time.

This forum has inspired, encouraged, and taught me everything all along the way, and my build wouldn't have been possible without all the great people here. I'm happy to be a part of it, and hopefully this thread will inspire some others......

In September of '07, after scouring craigslist for a week or two, I found a 1976 CB550k in Staten Island, about 70 miles away from my house in NJ. -Rented a barely-running beater of a U-haul, and went to scoop it up. The day after I got it home, it was in pieces; and I thought to myself (as everyone else who takes one of these apart for the first time probably does): Wow, that was easy- Motorcycles are so simple! I'll be done with this thing in two months tops! (I swore there were only a few worms down at the bottom of that can!)

So this is what my $600 bought me that day:

After most of the disassembly:

A crusty engine for your viewing pleasure:

And the frame before I ground off all unnecessary tabs and things:

Seeing the original bike again makes me want another one to restore and keep stock. That'll be my next project down the road...

So I'll post the before and after pics, then all posts after this will be how I got there. Here they are:

Thanks martino- The tank was from Benjie at benjiescaferacer.com, which brings me to my next post: Inspirado.

Here are some of the bikes that I looked at for ideas. I knew that I wanted a more modern style cafe, and Benjie's stuff has (IMO) a perfect blend of classic and contemporary that I really love, so I looked to his Pinas bike a lot.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures. I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions. ~H. S. Thompson~

One of the first things I did was try to clean everything. Initially, every part I pulled off the bike seemed like it was covered in dirt, grease, oil, dust, you name it. I ended up washing the engine three times before I thought it was sparkly enough, then I had to wait through the long north-eastern winter for it to get warm enough to paint it.

My plan was to polish all of the aluminum on the bike, until the day I started. The first few sessions were brutally slow-going, because I wasn't prepping the piece right. After I developed my own little method, it actually went very quickly. Here's what I ended up doing:

1. Clean the entire piece thoroughly with concentrated Simple Green, until no more dirt will come off of it.

2. Wet sand starting with 600 grit, (make sure to get all the factory clear coat off in this step), then go to 800 or 1000, then 1500. I stopped at 1000 grit- half out of hastened laziness, half because I didn't necessarily want a super-chromed mirror finish, just nice and buffed.

3. Polish on a spiral sewn wheel using white rouge compound. This is where you see the prep work really pay off. Once you have wet-sanded (which really doesn't take that long), it just takes some firm pressure against the wheel, and it polishes almost instantly.

My old camera was giving me problems during much of my build, and I wish I had more pictures. Here are a few....

"There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them — but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one.... Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba." Hunter S. Thompson, Song of the Sausage Creature, Cycle World, March 1995. (http://www.latexnet.org/~csmith/sausage.html)